China's Foreign Policy Since 1978: Return to Power.

• Author: Khoo, Nicholas

Over the past few decades, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has occupied the center of attention of global foreign policy. This attention has been triggered by China's newly implemented political strategies and its immense technological and economic development. This equation gets more interesting when the Marxist one-party rule is considered. China's significant rise in status and influence is reflected in important issues of global dynamics such as diplomacy, military power, economics, climate, global warming, etc.

China's Foreign Policy Since 1978: Return to Power is written by Nicholas Khoo, an Associate Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and an expert in Chinese foreign policy and Asian security. This is his fourth book with China as its focus; it reflects a clear view of China in the most important binomials of world affairs. The book consists of six chapters that are formatted as research articles, disclosing China's policy in different time periods.

In the introduction, Khoo presents an overview of the book while explaining some important terms, such as the 'China Dream.' The first chapter addresses China from the end of the Cold War to 2010, exploring China's troubled international relations with the U.S., Japan, and South Korea. Despite all of the ideological, political, and diplomatic turmoil, however, Khoo emphasizes that trade relations have not been affected. Instead, they have grown year-over-year, making China a force that now competes with the U.S. Khoo defines China mostly through its trade while analyzing its main projects, data and actors. He notes that, in the new post-Cold War 'trade game,' "China emerges in this analysis as a state that is comfortable with the U.S.-constructed international order" (p. 11).

In the second chapter, Khoo delves into the times of the Cold War, explaining the wedge strategy and the termination of the Soviet-Vietnamese alliance. By doing so, Khoo contributes to the "emerging literature on wedges as balancing tools in world politics" (p. 27). This chapter offers a helpful explanation of the wedge strategy and its importance. Giving concrete examples, Khoo analyzes PRC foreign policy from 1975-1978, first by analyzing the selective accommodation wedge strategy -even though this policy adaptation achieved no big success- and then, the shift toward adopting a confrontation wedge strategy that intensified the conflict in Sino-Vietnamese relations. The author also analyzes...